Friday, May 18th, 2018

I had some problems with my bouzouki recently. Now, I know my bouzouki pretty well. I can navigate the strings and frets to make music. But this was a problem with the pickup under the saddle of the bouzouki’s bridge. So it wasn’t so much a musical problem as it was an electronics problem. I know nothing about electronics.

I found it incredibly frustrating. Not only did I have no idea how to fix the problem, but I also had no idea of the scope of the problem. Would it take five minutes or five days? Who knows? Not me.

My solution to a problem like this is to pay someone else to fix it. Even then I have to go through the process of having the problem explained to me by someone who understands and cares about electronics much more than me. I nod my head and try my best to look like I’m taking it all in, even though the truth is I have no particular desire to get to grips with the inner workings of pickups—I just want to make some music.

That feeling of frustration I get from having wiring issues with a musical instrument is the same feeling I get whenever something goes awry with my web server. I know just enough about servers to be dangerous. When something goes wrong, I feel very out of my depth, and again, I have no idea how long it will take the fix the problem: minutes, hours, days, or weeks.

I had a very bad day yesterday. I wanted to make a small change to the Clearleft website—one extra line of CSS. But the build process for the website is quite convoluted (and clever), automatically pulling in components from the site’s pattern library. Something somewhere in the pipeline went wrong—I still haven’t figured out what—and for a while there, the Clearleft website was down, thanks to me. (Luckily for me, Danielle saved the day …again. I’d be lost without her.)

I was feeling pretty down after that stressful day. I felt like an idiot for not knowing or understanding the wiring beneath the site.

But, on the other hand, considering I was only trying to edit a little bit of CSS, maybe the problem didn’t lie entirely with me.

Perhaps, given the relative simplicity of the task I was trying to accomplish, the plumbing was over-engineered. That complexity wouldn’t matter if I could circumvent it, but without the build process, there’s no way to change the markup, CSS, or JavaScript for the site.

Still, most of the time, the build process isn’t a hindrance, it’s a help: concatenation, minification, linting and all that good stuff. Most of my frustration when something in the wiring goes wrong is because of how it makes me feel …just like with the pickup in my bouzouki, or the server powering my website. It’s not just that I find this stuff hard, but that I also feel like it’s stuff I’m supposed to know, rather than stuff I want to know.

I think it’s really, really, really great when people share their frustrations and struggles like this. It’s very reassuring for anyone else out there who’s feeling similarly frustrated who’s worried that the problem lies with them. Also, this kind of confessional feedback is absolute gold dust for anyone looking to write explanations or documentation for JavaScript or React while battling the curse of knowledge. As Paul says:

The challenge now is to remember the pain and anguish I endured, and bare that in mind when helping others find their own path through the knotted weeds of JavaScript.

Thursday, May 3rd, 2018

A progressive web app is an enhanced version of a Single Page App (SPA) with a native app feel.

To quote from The Last Jedi, “Impressive. Everything you just said in that sentence is wrong.”

But once you get over that bit of misinformation at the start, the rest of this article is a good run-down of planning and building a progressive web app using one possible architectural choice—the app shell model. Other choices are available.

Tuesday, February 27th, 2018

This post goes into specifics on Django, but the broader points apply no matter what your tech stack. I’m relieved to find out that The Session is using the tripartite identity pattern (although Huffduffer, alas, isn’t):

What we really want in terms of identifying users is some combination of:

System-level identifier, suitable for use as a target of foreign keys in our database

Login identifier, suitable for use in performing a credential check

Public identity, suitable for displaying to other users

Many systems ask the username to fulfill all three of these roles, which is probably wrong.

Friday, January 26th, 2018

Chris has set up a whole site dedicated to someone-else’s-server sites with links to resources and services (APIs), along with ideas of what you could build in this way.

Here’s one way to think about it: you can take your front-end skills and do things that typically only a back-end can do. You can write a JavaScript function that you run and receive a response from by hitting a URL. That’s sometimes also called Cloud Functions or Functions as a Service, which are perhaps better names, but just a part of the whole serverless thing.

Tuesday, October 31st, 2017

Rather than copying bad examples from the history of native apps, where everything is delivered in one big lump, we should be doing a little with a little, then getting a little more and doing a little more, repeating until complete. Think about the things users are going to do when they first arrive, and deliver that. Especially consider those most-likely to arrive with empty caches.

And here’s a good way of thinking about that:

I’m a fan of progressive enhancement as it puts you in this mindset. Continually do as much as you can with what you’ve got.

All too often, saying “use the right tool for the job” is interpreted as “don’t use that tool!” but as Jake reminds us, the sign of a really good tool is its ability to adapt instead of demanding rigid usage:

Netflix uses React on the client and server, but they identified that the client-side portion wasn’t needed for the first interaction, so they leaned on what the browser can already do, and deferred client-side React. The story isn’t that they’re abandoning React, it’s that they’re able to defer it on the client until it’s was needed. React folks should be championing this as a feature.

Thursday, September 21st, 2017

Ooh, this is a tricky scenario. If you decide to redirect all URLs (from, say, a www subdomain to no subdomain) and you have a service worker running, you’re going to have a bad time. But there’s a solution here to get the service worker to remove itself.

The server-side specifics are for NGINX but this is also doable with Apache.

Thursday, September 14th, 2017

In my experience, “full-stack developers” always translates to “programmers who can do frontend code because they have to and it’s ‘easy’.” It’s never the other way around. The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description.

Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

Speaking as an ancient web developer myself, this account by Gina of her journey into Node.js is really insightful. But I can’t help but get exhausted just contemplating the yak-shaving involved in the tooling set-up:

The sheer number of tools and plugins and packages and dependencies and editor setup and build configurations required to do it “the right way” is enough to stall you before you even get started.

Friday, March 17th, 2017

An open beta of Smashing Magazine’s redesign, which looks like it could be a real poster child for progressive enhancement:

We do our best to ensure that content is accessible and enhanced progressively, with performance in mind. If JavaScript isn’t available or if the network is slow, then we deliver content via static fallbacks (for example, by linking directly to Google search), as well as a service worker that persistently stores CSS, JavaScripts, SVGs, font files and other assets in its cache.

Thursday, December 8th, 2016

Remy wants to be able to apply progressive enhancement to React: server-side and client-side rendering, sharing the same codebase. He succeeded, but…

In my opinion, an individual or a team starting out, or without the will, aren’t going to use progressive enhancement in their approach to applying server side rendering to a React app. I don’t believe this is by choice, I think it’s simply because React lends itself so strongly to client-side, that I can see how it’s easy to oversee how you could start on the server and progressive enhance upwards to a rich client side experience.

I’m hopeful that future iterations of React will make this a smoother option.

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016

I’m so happy that Ember is moving to a server-side rendering model. Not only that, but as Tom points out here, it’s crucial that the server-side rendering is the default and the client-side functionality than becomes an enhancement.

Sunday, March 6th, 2016

The videos from EnhanceConf are started to go up already. Stefan’s talk really struck me—all the talks were great but this one had the most unexpected insight for me. It really clarifies a lot of ideas that I’ve been trying to articulate, but which Stefan crystalises by taking the long-zoom view.

Monday, January 19th, 2015

Let’s define “front-end” to mean the parts of the app relating to user interface, rather than those that happen to be running in the browser’s JavaScript VM.

But I think the author definitely taps into a real issue:

The real problem is the perception that any code running in the browser is front-end code.

Let’s face it: programming something in Angular and Ember has much more in common with programming something in Rails or Django than it has with writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This is something we’re running into at Clearleft: we’ve never done backend programming (by choice), but it gets confusing if a client wants us to create something in Angular or Ember, “because that’s front end code, right?”

The difference between back-enders and front-enders is that the first work in only one environment, while the second have to work with myriad of environments that may hold unpleasant surprises.

Yes!

I feel that the subconscious assumption that a complex JavaScript-driven web site or web app will run in only one monolithic environment is the root cause of many problems front-enders see in back-end-driven web-based projects.